Caffeine can be a friend to some and a foe to others! Coffee lovers and caffeine seekers often wonder about its content. While some people drink coffee for its taste, others need that caffeine boost. Not everyone can handle caffeine, though.
Many believe coffee is packed with caffeine, but did you know tea has more caffeine than coffee beans?
Still, coffee does contain caffeine. So, how much caffeine is in a cup of coffee, and how much can we safely drink daily? The caffeine amount in a cup of coffee depends on the coffee beans used. For instance, a standard cup of hand-brewed coffee using 15g of Arabica beans (which have 1.3% caffeine) contains about 195mg of caffeine. Note that this is the total caffeine in the beans; not all of it dissolves in water.
Two key points:
First, caffeine is water-soluble, making up about 30% of water-soluble substances. Second, when brewing coffee, we extract only 18-22% of the coffee compounds. The chemical formula for caffeine is C8H10N4O2, and larger molecules take longer to extract. So, different brewing methods and times affect how much caffeine ends up in your cup.
So we can know:
A cup of cold brew coffee (200ml/20g beans) has about 200mg of caffeine;
A cup of French press coffee (225ml/15g beans) contains about 120mg of caffeine;
A cup of hand-brewed coffee (225ml/15g beans) contains about 60-90mg of caffeine;
A serving of espresso (30ml/15g beans) contains about 85mg of caffeine.
Of course, the same espresso will also be affected by the size of the coffee beans, the coffee powder, the pressure of the espresso machine and the water flow, Wirsh's espresso machine's stable performance and pressure monitoring will help you better explore the different caffeine concentrations of the wonderful taste and experience.
